Oh, god, this took so long. Let's see if you can guess which part I stopped midway through and came back to after a few months of not watching Buffy. I've recently become obsessed with Merlin, sorry about that.

On the other hand, tell me what you think about the characters. What should I do with the relationship between Tara and Willow, or Anya and Xander? This is going to be pretty focused on Spike and Buffy, but honestly, Buffy is one of my least favourite characters on the show, and I love all the other characters, so I'm going to focus at least a bit on them as well.

"Have you phoned Giles?"

Willow turned around to see Tara standing there. Her face was serious, and Willow actually flinched at the sight of her.

"Not yet," she replied, still looking horribly guilty. She leaned against the kitchen counter, decided it would be easier to focus on breakfast, and smiled brightly. "Do you think Dawnie would want eggs? Or bacon? Or toast, with that special jam she likes? Or maybe everything, you know, she's probably going to be hungr -"

"Stop," Tara said quietly. "I know you're nervous. We're doing the spell today. We're all scared about all the ways this could go wrong. But breakfast won't make her talk to you again."

Willow glanced at her with tear-filled eyes. "I can't - I can't stop thinking - if it goes wrong - if we have to -"

Her gaze was steady and her words were clear. "You knew that was a possibility from the start. Willow, if this soul spell doesn't work, then you know what happens. It's not going to work if you don't think you can cast it. You've done this once, and if Xander was telling the truth, you were seventeen and in a hospital bed. You've come so far since then. You can do this."

There was a long moment of silence as her words resonated around the kitchen.

"I can do it," Willow muttered to herself. "Strong like an amazon, right?"

"Strong like an amazon," Tara confirmed softly.

"You really loved me, didn't you?" she asked, and it killed him to see that perfect mouth twisted into such an awful grin. Even when she had hated him, Buffy hadn't looked at him like that. "You were willing to die."

"Not like it was anything personal, Slayer," Spike said roughly, wishing they had given the job of watching the vampire to someone else. He was the only one with the stomach for it, though, and they knew it.

Buffy - no, not Buffy, it could never be Buffy - laughed. "You sure, William? Because it sure felt that way when you promised you'd take care of my family after I died. Great job with that, by the way. They're all wrecks."

"Yeah, and whose fault is that?" he asked her. "I didn't ask Red to cast that bloody spell. Can't say I'm glad, either. Buffy'd hate you. She'll probably hate me, too, after seeing the state of you and how I let that happen."

"Like she'll forgive you," the thing in Buffy's body laughed. "She was manipulating you from the start. She needed someone who would do anything for her and you were there. You're twisted and torn up and putty in these hands." She tried to indicate her hands, which, considering that she was tied to a chair, went unsurprisingly badly.

"Maybe so," Spike told her, not sure what she would remember of this. "Unfortunately for you, I don't happen to care."

Dawn didn't know what to do. She didn't know how to react. Her sister was back, and had tried to eat her. She knew she should feel miserable, but all she felt was hollow, like someone had scooped out her insides and left them in Buffy's broken coffin.

She supposed the first step towards dealing with this situation would be to have breakfast, the flaw being that she would have to see Willow and Tara, neither of them she particularly wanted to see.

That wasn't true. She needed to talk to Tara, who would give her the facts. She didn't want Willow's pretty lies and excuses. Dawn loved Willow like a second older sister, but she had an annoying and sometimes dangerous tendency to give only the facts that she thought were relevant and to exclude anything she didn't think needed to be said. She was the one who promised things were going to be alright so many times that the words meant nothing anymore.

Tara, on the other hand, shared her doubts and fears (or at least some of them) with her, and when she said things were going to be alright, they really were going to be alright. Dawn had learned to trust that what she said was the truth.

Of course, that was before a certain group of her sister's friends decided to dabble in necromancy. Tara couldn't be trusted any more than Willow could be anymore, and the same went for Xander and Anya. At the point, the only people who hadn't made her go through hell were Giles and Spike.

She wondered if Giles knew. Dawn knew that Willow wouldn't have the guts to tell him what she had done and Tara didn't feel that she knew him well enough, and while Xander and Anya each could have phoned him, she had a feeling that they wouldn't.

Phoning Giles, in this case, fell to her. She had been wanting to speak to him anyways. The only way she would get to have a long talk with the man who was a better father than her own (but not her own - did keys to hell dimensions have fathers?) would be to chat as if nothing was wrong, then drop the bomb at the end of the conversation.

Spike was the person she most wanted to talk to, but as he was watching the thing that wasn't her sister and would probably be a drunken mess for at least a day afterwards, if not a week, he wasn't the one to see now. Dawn was on her own.

The only thing she wished she could do on her own was eat breakfast.

"Anya, no."

"Why not?" She asked, annoyingly perky in the face of disaster. "Simple, to-the-point, very direct. Giles doesn't like it if you dance around a thing to much."

Xander let out an exasperated half-sigh, half-scream and dropped his half-burnt toast back onto the plate. "You can't phone someone and say, 'hey, we just resurrected your daughter and accidentally turned her into a vampire'! Humans don't do things like that!"

"Oh, so you're playing the human card, are you?" she demanded, perkiness turning quickly to tears and anger. She set her plate down loudly on the coffee table. "'Oh, no, Anya, you can't understand this because you aren't human. You can't do this because you're a demon. You can't say this because you don't know anything about human life.' I was born human and I'll die human, as frustrating as that is, and if you can't accept that, I don't know if I can be with you!"

Xander found himself speechless, and after a moment of looking at each other with half-broken hearts, he said quietly, "All I said was that it would hurt Giles, and we shouldn't say it like that."

"No, you said that we shouldn't say it like that, and the only reasoning you gave was that humans don't do that." Her voice was quieter too, and a single hot tear rolled down her face. "You need to stop doing that. The next time, I'll pack up and go, and I mean that."

"Alright," Xander agreed, already ashamed of himself. "I'm sorry, Anya."

She nodded jerkily and left the room. He sank onto the couch, hands over his face.